The Hare Krishna hill, in Bangalore. The latter project, said to be worth Rs 500 cr, is at the heart of the conflict.

A state of “semi-consciousness”
runs deep in many Krishna devotees nowadays, mostly related to their
precious International Society for Krishna Consciousness which has had a
harrowing time of it of late. The officials who run it and the swamis
they once looked up to are all in the news, and for quite unholy
reasons. ISKCON, in the last few years, has been dragged to court over
allegations of child abuse, sexual abuse, molestation cases, murder,
drug trafficking, copyright violations, financial fraud...the list runs
long. The biggest blow came in 2001, when the organisation settled, out
of court, a $400 million lawsuit filed by 44 adults who said they had
been abused as children at Hare Krishna boarding schools in India and
abroad, with the worst cases recorded in Mayapur in Bengal, and
Brindavan in Uttar Pradesh. In 2002, most ISKCON centres in North
America filed for bankruptcy to pay the reparation amounts to abuse
victims there.
Now, a decade later, more skeletons are tumbling out of the closet in
India. A major legal war, no less, is going on between the Mumbai and
the Bangalore centres over control of property worth an estimated Rs 500
crore on the Hare Krishna Hill at Rajaji Nagar in Bangalore. Madhu
Pandit Dasa, president of the ISKCON Bangalore temple, insists that the
trouble started in 1998. “The trigger point was the fall of Harikesa
swami. We had been told that he was a great sanyasi guru, a great
spiritual leader. He had over 3,000 disciples, mainly in Europe. When he
left ISKCON to marry a massage therapist and left with millions of
dollars, we were naturally stunned.”

And this high-ranking-guru-turning-rogue wasn’t a one-off. Of the
original 11 disciples appointed by Srila Prabhupada (the founder of
ISKCON) for the management of the movement worldwide, nine have “fallen
from grace”, with cases ranging from child molestation to murder,
embezzlement, sexual abuse, homosexuality, opulent living and duping
disciples registered against them. The “latest guru to fall” is
Prabhuvishnu Swami, who left ISKCON Australia in 2011 to live in Bangkok
with a commercial sex worker he had met there, says Madhu Pandit. After
Srila Prabhupada died in 1977, 41 gurus have left ISKCON, many
allegedly making off with large sums of trust money. Which is why the
Bangalore branch says it doesn’t want anything to do with the rest of
the movement in India which is, incidentally, headed by Mumbai.
ISKCON Mumbai has technically been the nodal agency for all the
temples and branches in the country. They allege that the Bangalore camp
is out on a smear campaign. “This is simply a case of Madhu Pandit and
his family members trying to usurp the Bangalore property,” says Dayaram
Das, spokesperson for ISKCON’s 22-member bureau in India. He alleges
that Madhu Pandit forged the signature of their temple president in
Vrindavan on a letter written to life members to woo them away from
Mumbai. “Before this happened, we were trying to make peace but we had
to take action against the letter because it was an act of indiscipline
and insubordination,” says Dayaram Das. He also claims that Madhu Pandit
rents the premises of the temple in Bangalore to trusts run by himself
or his family members.Some of these trusts include
businesses like selling Krishna-related paraphernalia etc. The trusts
also include the Rs 81-crore Akshaya Patra, an NGO that feeds 1.3
million school children mid-day meals across the country. They have also
set up a real estate company, says the Mumbai faction, developing the
land around Bangalore’s new Krishna Lila Park project, which in Madhu
Pandit’s words, will be a “spiritual Disneyland” filled with attractions
based on Lord Krishna’s leelas and will also have ISKCON’s tallest
temple. Pandit squarely refutes the charge of embezzling funds though.
“Our accounts are published and we have won awards for clean accounting.
We have outside trustees for Akshaya Patra that receives funds from the
government. Because it is a public-private partnership, we have kept
its accounting separate from donations received for ISKCON Bangalore.”

The Bangalore camp says Mumbai can’t accept the fact that the city’s
Hare Krishna Hill and the Akshaya Patra projects are extremely
successful—and solely developed by them. They say despite the repeated
attempts of many devotees, it was only in 1998 that there was even a
discussion in India about why so many gurus had “fallen”. They also
discovered a document—famously called the “July 9 letter” in ISKCON
higher circles—where Prabhupada had left instructions that after him
there would only be “ritviks” or representative acharyas who would
initiate disciples in his name.

After Prabhupada died, ISKCON was divided like an empire among the 11 disciples, each proclaiming they were gurus.

“The
governing body council (GBC), even when Prabhupada was alive, had tried
to replace the federal organisational structure, where each temple
functioned as a separate legal entity, with a centralised, bureaucratic
structure,” says Chanchalpati Dasa, Madhu Pandit’s brother-in-law and
vice-chairperson. This move was countered by Prabhupada by dissolving
the GBC temporarily. However, after he died, ISKCON was divided like an
empire among the 11 disciples (none of them Indians), with each
proclaiming they were gurus by disciple-succession. New recruits had to
worship them as gurus and Prabhupada was ascribed the role of
“founder-acharya”, accuses Chanchalpati. “I made a presentation to the
GBC, asking them to revert to Prabhupada’s original instructions,” says
Pandit.
The GBC immediately expelled him, his brother-in-law and another
colleague, Adridharam Das, who was at the time the Calcutta temple
president and a pro-reform proponent. However, being only a so-called
‘ecclesiastical body’ with no legal powers, the GBC asked ISKCON Mumbai
to legally remove all the three from the movement. The Mumbai chapter
says they were only acting on behalf of the global body in expelling
these “rebels”. Dayaram Dasa says Madhu Pandit and co should have sued
the governing body, not the Mumbai branch. “I am also against these
corrupt gurus and the way ISKCON is being affected by it all. But it’s
an internal matter and should be resolved internally. Pandit has dragged
it out into the open only as an excuse to usurp the property in
Bangalore...which actually belongs to Mumbai,” he says.
So as charges fly thick and fast, it’ll now be the courts who finally
decide the real ISKCON contenders. The high court verdict went against
the Bangalore faction, which they have since challenged. In this war of
faith, the one left bemused is the ordinary ISKCON devotee.